WSDA 2018 – A review

With over 225 participants, including students, teachers and trainers the World Schools Debate Academy 2018, the biggest version of the WSDA so far, came to a successful end after taking place from the 23rd to 30th of June.

The WSDA is a debate academy that teaches school students between the ages of 13 to 18 everything about debating in the World Schools Debating format in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. The students participate in a very intense week of debate training, followed by a three day tournament. The educational part of the academy consists of four different types of training. For the first type, the students get sorted into four different groups, based on their level of experience in debating. Members of the faculty offer lectures on different debate strategy topics, like Argumentation, Proposition and Opposition Cases, Refutation and Points of Information. After the lectures, the students go into smaller exercise groups, in order to deepen the material, that they have learned in the lectures in different practical applications. The third part of the training is called Electives. Different faculty members offer exercises about content or debate strategy, like Developing Stakeholder Analyis, Feminism in pop culture, The performance of public speech or Framing and Narrative. The students get to choose the topics that they want to hear about. Lastly, the students participate in practice debates, in order to use the knowledge that they have learned in the theory lectures and exercises. Next to the students track, teachers, coaches and accompanying adults learn about how to establish and run debate societies and organize debate events and how to spread debating in schools.

Exchange is also in the focus: For example, WSDA features the culture night. The participants bring things that represent their country, so that the other participants can learn more about the nations that are represented. The evening then always ends with people dancing to traditional music from all the countries. Next to culture night, the students also participated in a treasure hunt, a quiz night and a Kitsch party. One afternoon all participants visited the beautiful city of Bled and rode there on a little ship to Slovenias only island and saw Blejski grad (Bled Castle). Another afternoon walking trips to see the beauty of Kranjska Gora. This year students came again from all around the world, including, but not limited to Canada, Qatar, Kasachstan, India, Italy and Slovenia.

WSDA was organized as every year by Bojana Skrt with help from Ivan Koruza.

Impressions:

For Dina from Palestine, the reason to participate at WSDA was first of all learning about debating. But additionally for her the location where WSDA takes places, in the beautiful Julian Alps of Slovenia where a big reason to come to WSDA, where she had not been before.

For Rhia from India, her favourite debate session was the elective on International Relations, given by Helena-Nena Beznec from Slovenia. It was a topic she new she was interested in and was very excited to be able to learn more about it.

Annika from the United Arab Emirates talked about her expectations and how they became true. Before arriving to Slovenia she expected that it was going to very tough, and it has turned to be exactly that way. Due to the intensity, she said, that she has learned more then she expected and grew together with her team.

When talking to some students about the experiences they had at WSDA, Shrevas from the United Arab Emirates said that the most important thing that he had learned was to carry on and to work efficiently in a team and how he and his team can compromise for each other and learned how to support each other to help.

For Bahar from Turkey, meeting new people, and especially making a new close friend from Palestine was her favourite thing of WSDA and Annabelle from Malaysia mentioned that the nicest people that she met are her new friends from Canada, Palestine and India, and she was really excited about meeting Sheraz from England, one of the coaches.

Duncan Crowe, one of the trainers, answered to the question about how WSDA has changed compared to the last years, where he already participated as a trainer, that it is much bigger than before and that the students came from more places, but he was surprised that less students that are going to represent their country at WSDC participated this year.

The tournament that followed the educational part of the Debate Academy was won by the Slovenian National Team (Vasja Grošelj, Lucija Ivanuša, Filip Korošec, Reja Debevc, Sara Brdnik) in the final against team Wakanda (Annabelle Chin, Darian McCrary, Jerneja Logaj) on the motion TH prefers Asian Values over Western Liberalism.

Best speaker of the tournament was Maha Al Haroon from the Qatari national team.